sex, lies and one architectural visualization

I managed to get without even asking a freelance illustration job through my friend. My job was to do a one rendered visualization from a set of 2D drawings (the useal elevation, site plan and cross-sections) and the target / purpose of the illustration would be mainly marketing like sales brochure, website and magazine ads.

I got enough money from this to get me a new set of alloys for my car or pay my Poser6 & Vue5 bundle I bought few weeks ago - those are Poser ppl on the pic, so the app got useful really quickly! I bought the bundle before getting the illustration job so it wasn't bought for that purpose really.

Timing just sucked (it usually does...?) because it's been hellish few weeks now already because so much has been happening - although good things, luckily... we found a house we liked and bought it, but that of course caused us to get loan offers from several banks and all the related hassle. Then we escaped to Thailand where we spent 1½ weeks having a nice vacation and during that time managed to remotely sell our old house for 250.000 €uros which was very good price (for us). When we got back we needed to do some minor re-modeling and wall painting in the new house and start packing up the old one - then there was the move itself which was hell although we did use this time proper moving company. Then there was the frantic unpacking because moving company was coming to pick up the moving boxes week after the move... and of course I then got this job on top of everything which I foolishly accepted and then spent few evenings and ruined totally my 4-day easter holiday for making it happen... and when it was ready to be rendered hw/app problems came.

And of course I got less time to do it than I said I need from the start because they gave the source material few days late and I couldn't start right away either... and when the image was ready the architect had changed the colors...! Of course that's an additional work not included in the original contract and thus qualified for extra money, but still it sucked a bit.

Sometimes it's just like this and even if the above rant might seem negativ-ish I really liked doing this because it's a) paid job, b) something I was originally trained to do, having a BA in Architecture.

It's hardly photorealistic but the briefing was to go for bog-standard clean architectureal visualization where the house was the main thing and everything else could be simplified.

Modeling and texturing the house and enviroment like I would have liked would have resulted something out of resident evil (dirt maps and all those) and the client might not have liked that... :)

Original size for the image was 3000 pixels wide (10"/25cm @ 300dpi)

Nice pic :) though i find it a bit too unrealistic even for architectural visualization IMO.
(small bits of dirts don't hurt... vegetation too...)
I sometimes do the same for a friend of mine but he wants to have the 3D buildings composited with a background photo of the real surroundings, to make a better impression on the clients i suppose.
How much did you get paid for that one if i'm not being too curious ?

I told you already :)



The enviroment around the house sure could have been more "alive" and real but the customer wanted it that way, and we really didn't have time to make it look truly nice... it was more like Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am kind of job for me and them because they needed to get the brochures printed and all that.

In reality there's going to be wooden fence on the left side of the site but they didn't have a clue what kind of so we left it off. Also the ground in the front of the terraces are going to be stone tiled instead of grass, but again no clue whatkind so they said it's OK to have grass allover there.

The hw/app problem forced me to use Lightwave for rendering and I did not had time to do proper setup for lighting and had to keep radiosity samples really low to meet the deadline (one render took almost seven hours). Vue5 would have made a much better job at GI/vegetation but sadly it's also bit "french" software as far as usability and stability goes... small renders were fine but it crashed during printsize renders constantly. It might be because of a bad memory stick too and I have to investigate that further now that I have time to do it.

Nice job, you've got to work harder on covering up what an ugly design you were given *uuuuurgh!*. Architectural visualizations are really hard when clearly very little architecture was put into the design. FUGLY bastards! I think you could hide some of hte nastiness by putting some trees in in such a way that the shadows from the trees fall on the house and break up the regularity of the siding. I bet its aluminum siding too.

:p

i dunno... i think that's good enough for a basic visualization based on blueprints... i seriously doubt if the architectural drawings had any trees or shrubs in them, and besides, i doubt if adding them was part of the 'deal' anyways...

me thinks that the primary interest of the client was to have a basic vizualization of the construction... which, it looks like was done...

hey 'Stang... is this a walkthru type thing?

--Mike

lol, but he said the "target / purpose of the illustration would be mainly marketing like sales brochure." yeah, hes done a great job with the plans, the plans are just ugly, I was just suggesting ways he can go above and beyond to make it look better since its being marketted with this picture, so the visual appeal of the picture is critical I would imagine.

Your title says something about sex and lies? I thought you went on Jerry Springer or something but no just architectural visualization. What false advertisement! ;)

Just kidding, good stuff, but need lots of vegatation.

If only... this house is situated in the middle of the city so there's a big road (and a buss stop!) in the front side of the house, and the site on the left is currently just empty piece of land with absolutely nothing on it. Given that and a tight site with little planned vegetation it's hard to have trees or anything casting shadows.

I asked how much "artistic freedom" I have and basically they told me that adding something that's not really there is bad because the customer who might think that they lied about the house (and they would be right). So showing less was better here... and of course they have all the usual plans and elevations in the brochure too, and most people buying apartments like this from a small private constructor are mostly interested about the plans and square footage.

One of the reasons I posted this image is to give ppl a clue how these "real world" illustration jobs go - you do what your told to do, and usually have too little time to do it. And then the customer changes things. :)

It's better to treat these jobs "hey it's a paid job" attitude and forget how YOU would like to do it. Blitz and games are for making things like I like to do them. Funny thing is that these real world "boring" jobs usually pay a lot better than making your dream stuff...



Nope, just this static image. I have the model and it's notthat heavy polywise so making it Blitz3D walkthrough like Halo had would be possible in theory.

I think everything turned out all right. After all, the customer got the illustration they wanted, Mustang got the cash he wanted (win-win situation), and bonus! Mustang's extra cash contributes (at least somewhat) toward dream stuff like Blitz and games. Cool one, Mustang!

have you beveled the edges on your model?

Nope, no beveling... close-ups might have showed those but even 1 cm (and that's big bevel) bevel at this scale would have been visually pretty non-existent... and we tend to build out houses here so that the edges are sharp and straight ;P